Clustering Samba: Problems, Pitfalls and ... - FTP site. - Samba

¡ ¡ In a word –

¡ ¡ In a word – STATE ! Why is this hard ¡ Both TCP state and the SMB state above it. SMB uses TCP connections, so active failover is not seriously considered. ¡ All current SMB clusters are failover solutions, they rely on the clients to reconnect. Servers must keep state about client connections. SMB keeps a lot of state. Every file open must be compared with other opens to check share modes.

¡ ¢ ¢ Try starting from the front... To appear as a fileserver with one name and address, the incoming TCP streams from clients must be de-multiplexed at the SMB level and fed to different servers in the pool. First decision is to split all IPC$ connections and RPC calls to one server to handle printing and user lookup. RPC Printing handles are shared between different IPC$ sessions, very hard to split between servers. ¡ All other servers simply provide file service. Simpler problem to concentrate on.